It is easy to foresee one of two things for the enterprise on which I am starting at this moment. I must either establish a fact in literary criticism or I must resign myself to be regarded as an extremely ridiculous person. I accept the risk.

An English critic of influence and distinction some two or three years ago wrote an essay which received a sort of coronation and was rewarded with a prize of fifty pounds. The writer lamented that Burns had occasionally descended into English, and he labored to prove that under those conditions the poet either lost or in some measure degraded his faculty. My purpose in these pages will be to show that Burns was as indisputably a poet in one vehicle as in the other: and I shall even hope to demonstrate that he is at his best and highest in those frequent passages in which he diverges from that Ayrshire Scottish, which was his birthright, to the English tongue. It is not commonly recognized that (apart from his humorous and satirical poems) something like half of Burns's work is done in English pure and simple, nor is it apparently observed that even in some of those poems which are cited as being in the vernacular, the greater bulk of the verse is not even salted with a hint of dialect. One could readily imagine the laughter which might greet the statement that "Scots Wha Hae" is an English poem. Yet the fact remains that there are only five words in a work of twenty-four lines which are not indisputably English. They are "wha," "hae," "wham," "aften" and "fa"," and it is not necessary to point out that these also are English with a localized spelling. In the "Lines to a Mountain Daisy" there are eight Ayrshire words, and the poem contains

nine verses of six lines each. In the "Vision" there are thirty-five consecutive verses of six lines each in which there is not a solitary word of dialect or even of localized spelling. In "Mary in Heaven" we have four eight-line verses of pure English: and no intrusion of a hint of Scots. In "Man was Made to Mourn" there is no dialect. It contains eighty-eight lines. In the "Cottar's Saturday Night" there are one hundred and eighty lines, of which one hundred and thirty contain no Scottish word. It will be admitted by most whose opinion is of value that these are rather curiously chosen examples of the art of sinking. By the general consent of critical mankind "Scots Wha Hae" is the fieriest and intensest call to freedom to which the world has listened. You have but to write "o" for "a," to insert a "v" and a double "1," and, behold! a poem without a trace of local color. And it would appear to be pretended that this volcanic splendor of patriotic rage owes its virtue to a few odd forms of spelling. It is fairly clear that it owes its qualities to the fact that its author was a poet of very unusual faculty, and was, when he chose to be so, a poet in the English tongue. In the case of the cited verses of the "Vision," which are amongst the noblest lines patriot ever wrote, there is no such question offered to us, because they are English without spot or stain. The same fact is true of "Mary in Heaven," of which it may be justly said that it reaches the high-water mark of human emotion. The same fact is true of very much more than half the "Cottar's Saturday Night," which has moved its millions to tears and smiles the world

over.

Merely to establish the fact that Rob

ert Burns could write lovely or inspiring English is a task which presents no difficulty. But the theory I have at heart to prove is not one which will be at once or willingly accepted. It seems to me as if Mr. Henley had stood upon his head to think when he expressed the idea that Burns descended into English. To me it appears that he never in any case, in his really serious work, does anything but soar into it, and that his very value as a poet of dialect is incalculably increased by the fact that he was so great an English master. I shall try to prove that an essential part of his craftsmanship lies in his familiarity with English and his readiness to make use of it, and I shall hope to show a feature of his genius which has hitherto, so far as I know, been disregarded by all his critics. (I may say that I do not propose to deal with the Songs, some forty of which are possibly written in English for no better reason than that they were meant by a musical composer for an English, or partly English, market. I do not think them on the whole nearly so good as the Scots verses of their kind, though in both a perfunctory sort of inspiration seems frequently to have been at work. But to know where we are it is needful to say that we are dealing with a poet who for one reason or another chose to confine himself in some seventy poems to the English language, and who invariably employed that language more or less in his wholly serious dealings with pen and ink.

My argument will apply to Burns in his inspired and splendid hours alone, but it is obvious that it cannot deal with all of them. If the gentleman in the "Critic" cannot see the Spanish Fleet he has a reason for it. It is not yet in sight. In trying to show how much Burns was a master of English and to what effect he used his mastery I must not deal with "Halloween" nor

with "Holy Willie's Prayer," nor "Death and Dr. Hornbook," nor "The Holy Fair," nor the lines on Grose the Antiquary, nor the immortal address to the De'il, because not a line of English is to be found in any one of them. That each and every one of these is a masterpiece in its way I am not merely willing to admit but eager to proclaim, and there is one thing I feel impelled to say of them in passing, even if it should point to the extrusion of the English critic altogether. These outbreaks of wrath, of satire, of pathos, of humor and affectionate familiarity with old uses not yet bygone, are not rightly to be enjoyed by any foreigner whomsoever. The true lover of the truly vernacular verse of Burns is that he or she who was bred within their influence in childhood and in whose mind they awaken emotions which they cannot arouse in the minds of others. There are many passages which I cannot read or recall without a clear vision of my father's face, and a clear hearing of his Scottish voice. These things are of course extrinsic to the value of the verse, but they-and a hundred of their similars-lend a sacred pleasure dare I say?-to the reading of Burns, which is only known to those who have been born within his borders. It is very certain that if Burns had rigorously confined himself to the vernacular he would have had a comparatively poor audience in point of numbers, and even as things stand there are more downright pretenders amongst his professed worshippers than ever followed another poet. All the world over one meets cockney admirers of "Duncan Gray" for example, for whom "spak o' lowpin' o'er a linn" might be Chinese or Choctaw for anything they know to the contrary. It would be absurd to say that an intense pleasure may not be experienced in the reading of great work in any foreign tongue which one has had the industry to

study, but Ayrshire Scotch is not merely a foreign tongue to the average Englishman. It is a language of such intimacies as are not to be described in a glossary, and it cannot be appreciated to the full by one who has merely learned it as he might learn French or German. This is true, of course, of all little languages, and is known to lend a peculiar value to many small local literatures. That the poems of Robert Burns enjoy a more than local reputation is due not merely to the abounding genius which inspires the greater bulk of them. It is at least partially due to that other fact that so large a portion of his work (and of the very best and most poetical of it) is written in pure English, and that all but the humorous and satirical work is moderately understandable to the least industrious of English readers.

I shall be careful to bear in mind the truth that when Burns first began to write he had no idea of the dignity to which he was destined to elevate his native speech. In his day Ayrshire Scotch was the natural linguistic weapon for a herder of cattle or a tiller of the soil. No unsetting sun of genius had yet gilded its humble beauties into splendor, and in his wildest fancies the poet could not have dreamed of the work it would be his to do. He would see even more clearly than men of the present day, how much more copious, varied, sonorous, dignified and polished is the language written by Shakespeare, Milton and Addison than the obscure dialect in which he first learned the art of speech. This knowledge would naturally tempt him to deviate into English when he found himself inspired by a thought of unusual elevation. A little language, such as the Ayrshire Scotch was at the time when Burns was born to make it glorious, is excellent for humor, and super-excellent for the tenderer intimacies of the heart, but it is naturally

without terms in which to express certain lofty and subtle forms of thought. My contention in the first place is that Burns realized this keenly, in the second that he was artistically right, and in the third that it was this instinct which enabled him to lay soundly the foundations of a world-wide fame instead of building a merely local reputation.

The peasant of the Parmesan district eats his native cheese, when he can get it, in the lump. The epicure uses. it as a condiment only. "Halloween" and "Holy Willie" are Parmesan in the lump. In the "Saturday Night" the dialect is used just freely enough to give piquancy, and in "Scots Wha Hae" and "The Daisy" there is, as we have seen already, but the merest careful sprinkling, enough to bestow a flavor and no more. Dropping the simile, let us notice the overwhelming advantage which Burns enjoys over other great British poets. He is the owner of an additional language, which he can use in its purity if he so pleases, and which he alone amongst other writers of acknowledged greatness is permitted to intermix in any degree which may seem befitting to him with a more dignified and copious Vocabulary. To illustrate the astonishing and perfect art with which he does this I must needs have recourse to quotation. But before I proceed to the actual citation of words, I will offer a broad illustration of the principle of the criticism I apply to Burns. Often as he has proved his mastery of pathos, his two greatest achievements in that way are I presume I may say by common consent-the lines to Mary and "Ye Banks and Braes." Each lays before us the sorrow of departed joys, and the emotions produced by the reading of the one are very closely akin to the emotions produced by the reading of the other. What instinct led the poet to write the one wholly in Eng

It

lish and the other in a delicately blended form of the English and Ayrshire tongues? The answer appears to be simple. In the lines to Mary no touch of local color is needed to add to the poignant effect produced. We are here in the presence of a bereaved human creature whose soul is one anguished cry after the departed. does not matter in the least whether the heart be that of a Scot or a Breton or a Mongol. Humanity is greater .than nationality. Manhood-simple manhood-writhing in that agony we have all known or are doomed to know, sends forth this lamentable and exceeding bitter cry. That it is an Ayrshire peasant who thus suffers makes no difference in the world. But in "Bonnie Doon" rusticity is an essential of the whole matter. A country girl is lamenting the perfidy of her lover, and if we had not the touching dialect in which she pours forth her grief we should not have present to our minds the simplicity which contributed to her downfall, and which at once elicits our pitying pardon. Let us try the last four lines in English:

With lightsome heart I pulled a rose Full sweet upon its thorny tree, And my false lover stole my rose

But ah! he left the thorn to me.

gone

Nothing can spoil the beauty of the conceit, and yet a something has evaporated a suggestion of artlessness and innocence. Beautiful it is and beautiful it remains, and if Burns had chosen SO to write it, it would have home: but he did better with it. It is pure English with an Ayrshire accent -nothing more. But the accent is an essential here. And so we get it. For Burns never writes English where Scotch will serve his turn better, and never writes a word of Scotch where English is needed for his purpose. I suppose that if there is one of his poems more intensely identified than

another with what I may call the general Scottish legend it is that tremendous blend of farce and horror, of devilment and beauty, called "Tam o' Shanter." There are many moods expressed in this amazing poem, and they are all differentiated by the linguistic method employed in dealing with them. Where the mirth-or the grotesquerie is at its wildest the speech is at its broadest. At the level of narrative its rudenesses are partially subdued. Where gravity, or, for the matter of that, mock gravity, comes in, pure English comes in with it. The study of the following eight lines will repay the discerning lover of artistic method. It will be noticed that the first two lines are as vulgar-I use the word in its legitimate sense-in matter as in expression. Then follows the dawning of a reflection in which the verbal fashion is considerably modified, and the last two lines of the passage-in as clean a bit of strenuous English as you may meet in a day's reading-introduce to the imagination a domestic figure at the sight of which many brave men have shaken in their shoes. I invite the attention of the critic to the extreme delicacy with which this transition is accomplished.

While we sit bousing at the nappy
And getting fou and unco happy,
We think na' o' the lang Scots miles,
The waters, mosses, slaps and styles,
Which lie between us and our hame,
Whaur sits our sullen sulky dame;
Gathering her brows like gathering
storm,

Nursing her wrath to keep it warm.

In returning to the wholly humorous consideration of

The mony serious sage advises
The husband frae the wife despises,

the poet permits himself the broadest employment of dialect: as for example:

She tauld thee weel thou was a skellum.

A blethering, blustering, drunken blellum;

That frae November till October
Ae market day thou wasna sober;
That ilka melder, wi' the miller,
Thou sat as long as thou had siller;
That every naig was ca'd a shoe on
The smith and thee got roaring fou on:

And so on, in almost but not quite the broadest of dialect, until the poet's thought rises beyond the noise of Soutar Johnnie's mirth, and the atmosphere of the reaming swats that drank divinely: and with the rising of the thought, he chooses once again the nobler medium of expression, and in eight lines of universally acknowledged beauty he challenges a place beside the best of those who have written in English verse alone.

But pleasures are like poppies spread, You seize the flow'r, its bloom is shed! Or like the snow-flake in the river, One moment white-then melts for

ever;

Or like the borealis race

That flit ere you can point their place; Or like the rainbow's lovely form Evanishing amid the storm.

Thenceforward for a time the poet holds a middle course. The dialect is full, but not quite of the richest, and there are lines in which it is absent altogether, because the storm and the horror are coming on and we must needs have a touch of dignity in keeping with the theme. And now the tempest is here in earnest, and no mere dialect is big enough to speak of it.

Before him Doon pours all her floods; The doubling storm roars through the woods;

The lightnings flash from pole to pole; Near and more near the thunders roll; When glimmering through the groaning trees

Kirk-Alloway seemed in a bleeze.

It is a fact which the most cursory study will establish that whenever Burns is splendid he is English. There is of course a sense in which he is splendid almost everywhere, but I do not mean to use the word that way. When he is tender he is English with a Scottish accent, as I have shown already in one example and could show in fifty if I had the space to move in. Whenever he is dignified in theme he is English pure and simple. There are five verses in "A Bard's Epitaph," and here are three of them:

Is there a man whose judgment clear Can others teach the course to steer Yet runs himself life's mad career Wild as the wave?

Here pause and thro' the starting tear

Survey this grave.

The poor Inhabitant below
Was quick to learn and wise to know,
And keenly felt the friendly glow

And softer flame.

But thoughtless follies laid him low
And stain'd his name!

Reader, attend! Whether thy soul
Soars fancy's flights beyond the pole,
Or darkling grubs this earthly hole,
In low pursuit,
Know, prudent, cautious self-control
Is Wisdom's root.

The verse is didactic, and there are some strange people who would limit the definition of poetry to the exclusion of its special mood, but the verse beginning "The poor Inhabitant below" has a place in too many hearts and memories to be readily relinquished.

But let us look for a further confirmation of my theory at one of those poems which the careless or casual reader of Burns would class among his vernacular works. Let us take the address to a Field Mouse. I am not concerned to defend the first three lines of the second verse, which are flatly prosaic in expression, but I call atten